Sam lies in her bed in the hospital ward. She has closed her eyes, hoping that if she doesn't have to look at anything she will be able to concentrate on simply breathing, something that now requires every bit of her attention.

If she is breathing, she must still be alive.

The door leading to the passage is open. Sam can hear two voices rising and falling just outside: a man's, indistinct, agitated; a woman's, clearer, calmer, firm.

'I suppose it won't do any harm for you to sit at her bedside for a while,' says the woman, 'but if she's asleep you absolutely must not wake her. We can't do very much more at this point than to make sure that she rests.'

There is a chair by her bed; she hears it creak slightly. It takes a colossal effort, and she can't focus her eyes, but she opens them just enough, and for just long enough, to see a man.

Young. Dark hair. In uniform. Green.

Sam closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again, no wider than the last time, and tries to focus on her visitor.

A man. Young. Dark hair. In uniform.

Blue.

She tries to draw a breath, then tries to say something, but isn't sure what – a name, perhaps.

It is more than she can do. She closes her eyes, catches her breath, swallows. After a moment she opens her eyes again.

A man. Young. Dark hair. In uniform.

Green.

Sam smiles a bit, to be polite, then closes her eyes. Easier that way. Not only breathing. Everything.

The next time she opens them the sun is shining at a different angle, and Joe has gone.

Days later, when the streptomycin has begun to do its work, she will recall the name she was trying to say. Then -

'Sam.'

- she will put the matter out of her mind -

'Miss Stewart?'

- which is where it will stay -

'Sam?'

- until now.

'Sam!'

'What?! Oh!'

'Mr Foyle wants to speak with you,' says Brooke.

'I'm so sorry, sir!' Sam gasps, leaping to her feet. 'I was a million miles away!'

'I can see that,' Mr Foyle replies. 'Are you quite all right?'

All three of them – Mr Foyle, Brooke and Milner – are standing in the waiting room, watching her carefully. Even Mr Reid is looking on from the doorway to his office.

'Yes, of course I am! I was just... thinking about something.'

'Hm. Well, be that as it may, you have tomorrow off,' Mr Foyle tells her.

'There's absolutely no need for that, sir! I'm perfectly fine!' Really, this is becoming ridiculous!

'There'll be nothing for you to do here tomorrow. I have to go to London to meet with my A.C.C.'

'Should I collect you in the morning and drive you to the station, then, sir?'

'Thanks, but better not. I'll have to catch the 7.15 express. Or try to.'

'Oh, dear! What about meeting your coach when you return?'

'Thank you, Sam, but I don't know what coach that will be. It's starting to get dark earlier, there are no longer any express runs to Hastings after one o'clock, and I don't care to travel in the blackout. If I can't leave London by six o'clock I'll stay the night with my brother-in-law and his wife.'

'What if Sgt Milner needs -'

'Sam. This department has muddled through without you for most of August. We can manage for one more day without having to shut down.' She looks exhausted anyway, which is probably my own bloody fault. Bad timing, worse judgment. 'I don't think I'm going to need anything else today, so if you'd like to go home, you may.'

'Thank you, sir.'

Foyle has nearly reached his office when he hears Sam say, 'Sir?'

When he turns around he sees that she is standing with her shoulders squared and her chin lifted, feet slightly apart.

'It's twenty to six and it's still raining – not hard, but it doesn't look as though it's about to stop,' she announces, in the same voice she used that morning to place the subject of Andrew out of bounds. 'Are you quite sure you wouldn't like me to drive you home? I think that I ought to.'

Andrew shuts his notebook and sighs. Nothing is coming to him, not for the moment at least. There's no point, really. Some almighty nerve I've got, using this notebook, of all things. Nothing else left to write on, though.

He has nothing to do now but to try not to think about the past eighteen months as he waits for his father.

Debden had not been so bad at first. True, not being able to see Sam, embrace her, talk with her, really was terrible – more so even than he had expected. It had felt as though a hole were drilled into him somewhere.

There were WAAF about the base, driving and sending messages and doing the other things WAAF did. They looked artificial – shiny and hard and cheap – compared to Sam, but in the very back of his mind he began to worry about what might, just might, happen if that hole grew larger.

But Sam wrote to him most weeks, which helped a great deal. He wrote back, telling her about his pupils and how pilots were trained. For the first time since he'd come down from Oxford he began seriously applying himself to writing poetry in whatever spare time he had, carefully copying out anything he thought passable and sending it to her.

His father wrote as well, of course, and occasionally Andrew read the same story in two letters, once told from his father's vantage point, once from Sam's.

He had a photograph of Sam in uniform, hair pinned up, cap on head, that he'd tacked up on the wall above his bunk; a rather official-looking picture, except for Sam's almost ecstatic smile. The other officers would ask him about her.
'She's A.T.S., then?'
'No, Mechanised Transport Corps. Public safety and so on. She works for the Hastings Police. Nerves of steel. They depend on her for all sorts of things.'
'She's a stunner. You're an extremely lucky chap.'
'I know it.'
Occasionally some git – Palgrave, for one – would misread that smile, which always sent the conversation downhill.
'Makes for a nice bit of spare, I'll wager.'
'I beg your pardon. She's hardly the sort of girl one can speak about in that way. There's a great deal more to her than just that.'
It took Andrew's breath away to contemplate how completely walking out with Sam for a few short months had changed the way he thought about this.

In the spring Sam sent him a new photo of herself, wearing the same dress and cardigan she'd worn the first time he's taken her to the cinema, her hair tumbling in waves and curls over her shoulders. He kept that one to himself.

He'd been promoted; he was out of the fighting. He knew how pleased and relieved his father was about this, and Sam as well, so he tried to ignore the nagging feeling that he'd been kicked upstairs and was no longer doing his part.

The pupils were a remarkable lot, to be sure. But as time went on – and as bad news had started to come in about some of the pilots he'd helped to train – he'd begun to wonder how well he could prepare these men for what they would face. He had only his own small, specific experience to draw on. Whatever he'd done, by itself, started to seem less and less significant, less and less useful, as the war grew larger and larger.

And the fact was that, as exhausted as he'd been at the end of his time flying ops out of Hastings, he missed flying more and more as the months went by.

And after a while, too, Debden itself began to weigh on him.

It was farther away than he had realised, for one thing – not so much geographically, but in terms of isolation. The airbase was built on the site of a large farm, and it was entirely surrounded by farms of similar size; in any direction, the view from its edges was of fields as far as the eye could see.

The nearest coach stop was twenty minutes away if transport was available. On foot, in decent weather, it took easily an hour to get there. This, combined with all of the cutbacks in service, meant that unless one was very lucky indeed the journey between Debden and Hastings could easily stretch to eight hours. And since Galloway seemed to regard it as a point of honour that nobody should ever have more than twenty-four hours' leave at a time, it was effectively impossible for Andrew to go home.

He'd explained this to Sam, who commiserated but agreed that there wasn't much to be done.

There was a tiny village just over the horizon to the south, but there was nothing to do there: no pub, no cinema, not even a café. Andrew had thought at one point of asking his father to give Sam a holiday and then asking her to come to Debden and see him – a bit irregular, this, though after all there was a war on – but there was absolutely nowhere for her to stay. Some killjoy nonconformist sect must have settled this place, Andrew thought.

And then, just after the New Year, he'd been summoned to Galloway's office. Two visitors to the base were waiting there. They wanted to speak with him.

'What is your meeting tomorrow about, sir?' Sam asks.

Foyle hesitates. He can make a pretty good guess but in truth he isn't certain. Rose was opaque even by his usual standards.

'I have a feeling that if I knew, I wouldn't be allowed to discuss it.' There. That wasn't actually a lie.

'Do you think that all that stolen paper will show up on the black market?'

'That's possible.' Not especially likely, but possible.

'Here we are, sir,' Sam announces.

The blackout has not yet begun and she pulls the car up in front of the house just in time to see, out of the corner of her eye, a light being switched on in the sitting room and a figure inside approaching one of the windows, then quickly withdrawing.

Seeing the Wolseley approaching, Andrew is frozen to the spot for an instant – just long enough to see the familiar shape of the MTC driver's cap, not especially flattering though admittedly very practical.

'Good journey tomorrow, sir,' Sam says. Her voice is suddenly smaller and higher than usual.

'Thank you.'

'Should I at least check in at the station in the morning,' she asked, her voice now closer to its usual pitch, 'to see if... anyone needs... anything?'

'If it makes you feel better, Sam.'

Author's notes:
The Debden airbase (opened 1937; closed 1974, although the British Army now uses the site as the Carver Barracks and many of the original buildings are intact) is located at approximately 51°59'30.0"N 0°16'14.0"E, in northwest Essex between the village of Debden and the town of Saffron Walden, but much closer to the former – which, incidentally, should not be confused with the much larger identically-named town in southwest Essex. My description of the base and its surroundings is partly speculative – based on recent satellite and Google Streetview images – and partly a product of my imagination, and is certainly not intended to cause any offense to anyone.

The King's Regulations and Air Council Instructions, like similarly-titled documents directed at other branches of the armed forces during World War II, expressly forbade the keeping of diaries or journals. The concern was that such a diary might provide the enemy with valuable information in the event of capture or invasion. The rule was widely ignored, however, and stationers openly marketed pocket-sized diaries to servicemen and women.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the phrase a bit of spare will need to look it up for themselves, as I can't get a really useful definition past the FFN server's filters.